by Rod Williams, May 30, 2025- The Department of Homeland Security has named Nashville a sanctuary City. This is new. Other cities that are considered sanctuary cities have designated themselves as such. While there are no legal criteria that makes a city a sanctuary city, in general a sanctuary city is one that limits local cooperation with immigration officials. The policies of a sanctuary city include prohibiting police or city employees from questioning people about their immigration status and refusing requests by national immigration authorities to detain people beyond their release date, if they were jailed for breaking local law.
Tennessee state law prohibits a jurisdiction in Tennessee from being a sanctuary city and requires local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE officers and requests to hold non-citizen inmates for deportation. This law was passed in 2017. In February of this year, a law went into effect that creates criminal penalties for officials who adopt sanctuary policies and requires their removal from office upon conviction. The law makes it a Class E felony, resulting in a potential prison sentence of between one to six years, for "each official who, in their capacity as a member of the governing body of a local government, votes to adopt a sanctuary policy." Of course, Nashville has not voted for any such policies and the law would apply to members of the Metro Council in the case of Nashville.
Our Sheriff cooperates with ICE. The Sheriff has said his department does not engage in immigration enforcement but, of course, Nashville's Sheriff's office is not a law enforcement agency. The Sheriff has said he follows the law and notifies ICE when an undocumented alien is booked and gives ICE 48 hours to respond.
It is obvious that Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell has annoyed the Trump administration by letting his displeasure with the ICE raids in Nashville be known and by helping to create a private fund to help those families left behind when a family member is deported. Representative Andy Ogles has said Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees are launching an investigation into the mayor's ‘conduct’ during ICE operations. The investigation is also looking to see if any federal funds were being used for ‘criminal enterprise.’
This is going to get tricky. It looks like the mayor has done nothing illegal and has simply spoken out and expressed his outrage or grandstanded, depending on how you see it. Obviously, Nashville Metro Council has not passed any policies that would violate State law. We may be doing the minimum to cooperate with ICE or simply not obstructing ICE, and the mayor's rhetoric is anti-ICE, but we have not crossed any line that would make us a sanctuary city under State law.
The problem is that the Trumpinista dominated legislature, and State government will want to show their fealty to Trump by agreeing that Nashville is a sanctuary city and punishing Nashville. How do they agree with the Trump regime that Nashville is a sanctuary city, when the federal government has no definition of what a sanctuary city is, and when Metro has not violated the State law that defines a Sanctuary city? When law is simply whatever those in power say it is, and there is no hard definition of what is and what is not against the law, it makes it difficult to point to what law was violated. Surely, the law has to be more than the mood of Donald Trump or the opinion of the head of Homeland Security.
For more on this issue see link, link. For my views on the Nashville ICE raid see, Reflections on the Recent ICE Raids in Nashville.
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